eipcp

Creating Worlds

In the societies of control, the aim is no longer to appropriate as in societiesof sovereignty, nor to combine and increase the
power of the forces as in disciplinary
societies,but to create worlds.
Maurizio Lazzarato

Creating Worlds is a multi-annual research project that investigates the relationship
between art production and knowledge production in the context of the
transformations and crises of contemporary capitalism. Creativity becomes an
ambivalent term here, “creating worlds” meaning a modulating procedure in
cognitive capitalism and societies of control, but also an emerging political
dimension of creativity as political imagination and invention of new lines of
flight, new struggles, new worlds.

Creating Worlds will be developed in the years 2009 to 2012, involve research,
publication and artistic projects and is structured around three thematic
plateaus:

1. A Critique of
Cognitive Capitalism

Creativity, invention and
knowledge are at the core of contemporary modes of production. A number of theory
currents from the social sciences, philosophy and cultural studies describe the
economic and political transformations of the last 40 years as being
fundamentally knowledge-based. Central concepts of this transformation to the
postfordist paradigm of cognitive capitalism are the terms immaterial labor,
creative labor, cognitive labor, affective labor, knowledge economy and
knowledge society. The role of invention and knowledge production as the “raw
material” of a new economic order emerges against the background of the rapid
development of new information and communication technologies, a re-ordering of
intellectual property and the transformation of knowledge into a commodity.

Nevertheless this is not to
be understood as a simple movement from “manual labor” to “mental labor”. In
the cognitive paradigm we should instead speak of a parallel movement of the
immaterialization, informatization and acceleration of communication in the
capitalist centers and the simultaneous shift of traditional industrial and
manual labor to the dependent peripheries of the “Second” and “Third World”.

Against this background, we
want to look at the shifts and intersections of the immaterial and its
materiality, the post-industrial generalization of innovation, invention and
creativity, as well as the feminist and post-colonial critiques of the
phenomena and the concept of cognitive capitalism. Critical art practice as
knowledge production is not only part of these transformations or just a lens,
through which they become articulated, but assumes the function of a question
mark making visible and problematizing the rigid regimes of copyright economies
and creative industries.

2. The Knowledge Factory
and its Discontents

When knowledge production
becomes the raw material of cognitive capitalism, one of the main questions is:
What becomes of the old factory of knowledge? With the rising importance of
knowledge, universities and art academies move to the eye of the storm, become
objects of desire of neoliberal transformations, objects of competition between
regions and continents, but also subjects of struggles against these
transformations and competitions. Though the university as a privileged site of
struggle has – except for a few moments in time – been only a myth, there seems
to be a rising tide of conflicts around it. Within these conflicts we
experience a growing demand for exodus, deserting from both authoritarian and
neoliberal forms of knowledge factories, creating self-organized groups within
and beyond universities and art academies.

At the same time, the
factory of knowledge becomes diffuse, a “fabbrica diffusa” transgressing the
fordist borders of space and time, of schools and universities as exclusive
institutions of knowledge production. For some, this evokes images of a
horrible and continuous prison of lifelong learning, for some it gives rise to
new hopes for a future mass-intellectuality; for some it causes terrible new
modes of subjectivation, for some it actualizes itself in micro-political
processes of self-organized education and auto-formazione
beyond universities. We want to take a closer look at these different
scales of transformation and struggle in the knowledge factory and into the
wide fields of self-organized and alternative knowledge production between new
forms of free classes at universities and art academies, new generations of
social centers and nomad universities.

3. The Overlaps of Art
and Knowledge Production

Though concepts of artistic
research and art as knowledge production are quite fashionable and have become
constant components of curricula at art academies and policy papers of cultural
advisors, research has not yet progressed very far on questions of the role of
art production in cognitive capitalism, on the function of the art field, and
especially on the relationship of art and theory production within these social
transformations. Against this background, we want to investigate specifically
the relationships, overlaps and neighboring zones between knowledge production
and art production in a process of exchanging scholarly and artistic strategies
of research and analysis.

Theoretically, these
neighboring zones of art, science and philosophy were already conceptualized in
the last jointly authored book by the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and
Félix Guattari. In What is Philosophy?
Deleuze/Guattari write of the concepts, sensations, and functions becoming
indistinguishable, “at the same time as philosophy, art, and science become
indiscernible, as if they shared the same shadow that extends itself across
their different nature and constantly accompanies them.” Our aim is to more
precisely investigate this shared shadow, these overlaps, these neighboring
zones.